I'm not suggesting Clippy, I'm just suggesting disambiguation. Google already does this for typos (You searched for "kats musical song list" did you mean "cats musical song list"?). If Google noticed that the cats pages fell into 3 major categories (musical/animal/character who says 'all your base') and offered me those options in the typo line, I'd find that useful in narrowing down which of the 86,500,000 pages it found is the right one.
In your example, I'm guessing you might find the option to filter down by gay/straight or censored/uncensored useful?
No it's an terrible report. It's practically a cut and paste press release, and it's full of inaccuracies, fud and lies from the AACS.
"Digg began taking down pages that its members had highlighted were carrying the key." This implies that Digg took down external sites that it's members were pointing to. They did nothing of the sort, they only took down the pointers.
"The website said it was responding to legal "cease and desist" notices" Implies that Digg thought those takedown notices were legal. The legality of the takedown notices is actually highly questionable.
"Michael Ayers, chair of the AACS business group, said it had received "good cooperation from most folk" in preventing the leak of the key." A blindingly obvious lie that the BBC should have questioned.
"But a line is crossed when we start seeing keys being distributed and tools for circumvention. You step outside of the realm of protected free speech then." Another lie that the BBC reprinted unquestioningly.
"He added that the copy protection on the HD-DVDs was "absolutely not broken"." Another lie.
Most importantly, the AACS are repeatedly calling the discovery of the key a "leak" - it's not a leak at all, it was discovered, not leaked.
The sad thing is that it's so easy to learn how to get good results using current search engines, but people are never taught how to do it.
RDF could do very useful things, like throwing up a disambiguation question at the top os the results page when you've not made it clear what you want, or filtering out the plague of typosquatter/content free price comparison/'be the first to write a review of this item' sites, but so could a bit more intelligence built into Google.
Think about what Steve Jobs had to offer Intel or AMD at the time they decided to drop the PowerPC. AMD and Intel are at war over market share, and Steve held over 2% of the market by volume (and given Macs are not cheap, a bigger share if you go by $ value), and was offering exclusivity. AMD and Intel knew that if they didn't get that 2%, the other would. That's an incredibly strong bargaining position for Apple.
We don't know what's in the deal that was stuck with Intel, but given Steve's reputation for hard bargaining and Intel's desire for market share at any cost, I'm willing to bet it makes any chance of moving to AMD pretty unlikely - just look at where Intel are sending the world's entire supply of 3Ghz 4-core x86 chips.
It's not the contract on DVDs that's being discussed, it's the contract between the owners of CSS and manufacturers who buy into CSS. Kaleidescape signed the contract that gives them the right to make legitimate machines that unscramble CSS, the CSS cartel claim that contract includes a 'thou shalt not make dvd servers' clause, the judge agreed with Kaleidescape that the contract does not say that, since Kaleidescape didn't get to see that particular rule until after they joined the cartel.
This wouldn't just require new equipment to view the new transmissions, it would also require throwing out all the freeview kit that the BBC and the digital alliance have spent years convincing the public to buy. This idea could only really be implemented in an unused frequency band - the space vacated by the analogue switch-off seems ideal for it to me, if only the UK government can be prevented from selling it for some other use.
As the article says, a far simpler solution to the badwidth issues of freeview would be to ditch the huge number of junk channels and use the bandwidth to provide a HD signal for the ones that people actually watch.
Can someone in the know explain haw patent expiry works in US law? Here in Britain, patents last for 17 years, but can somesimes be extended to 20, so this patent filed March 25, 1987 wouldn't be valid - unless it's the date the patent is granted not the filing date that counts?
"the most successful launch in the history of the video games industry in Europe"
Hang on, Sony missed Christmas, gave us hobbled backwards compatibility and priced the thing so you can't get a console and a game for less than $900 here. Stores are full of people queueing for the Wii and ignoring stacks of unsold PS3s. I'd hate to see this guy's idea of an unsucessful launch!
Thanks so much, apple-U shows the headers properly! I'd assumed 'message source' meant viewing html/mime formatting, but the headers are there too, with line-wraps. This is a great work-round for me and anyone else trapped by this problem.
The yahoo panel only works if you know which throwaway yahoo ID you used...
I'm disappointed. No new features I actually want, at least 1 of the bugs I'm really annoyed about not fixed, and at least 1 new bug added.
Firstly, doing a 'check for updates' in the old version (1.5 for OS X, I think) told me there wasn't a new one. Then when I manually downloaded, installed and got past the inevitable 'we broke all the extensions' message, it's ignoring my preference to show text not icons in the toolbars. So I go into preferences, and it's saying I'm showing text only. I workround by switching to text plus icons then back to text only. It's decided to ignore my custom toolbar settings from the old version, so I manually rebuild them the way I like them. The text doesn't line up, 'get mail' floats half a line too high, and 'tag' is out of line too. The gaps between the text isn't consistent horizontally, there's more space around 'junk' than other tools.
Then the real pain, viewing full headers is still totally broken. The header text doesn't wrap, it ignores text size changes, and it can't be cut and pasted either. This means that I can't see the crucial part of the header that says the original 'to' address, after it's been forwarded to the catch-all on my domain, as it's on a line that's longer than my monitor is wide. So I still can't unsubscribe from a couple of (now spam dominated) Yahoo groups that I signed up to with throwaway names, as I have can't read the header to find out the throwaway name I used!
The jury is still out on the other annoying bug, where the automated 'compact folders' and automated 'get mail' try to run at the same time as each other and throw up a message blaming me for not waiting for one to finish before the other.
We've only got a report about this not the actual Sony statement to go on, but it seems to me that there's a total lack of apology here, just a blatantly absurd claim about how few complaints there were. Come on Sony, at least have the guts to say you are sorry... if if it's only 'we're sorry we got caught'.
Sony's PR department really don't seem to understand that they have a monumental image problem. A bit of humility in their press releases could have won back some respect for free, but instead they sent out something that reeks of arrogance.
The Apple Pro Mouse was the good one: optical sensing plus a beautiful design. The bad one was the previous Apple 'hockey puck' mouse, it's circular design meant you have to look away from the screen to see which way it was facing, and the mechanical ball rollers were a pain to clean. The majoy *annoyance* was however, not then mouse itself, but PC users crowing on about the 'one button' design, ignoring the fact that Mac Software was (surprisingly enough) designed for 1 button mice, and 103 more buttons were available on a nearby keyboard when required.
At the risk of being modded down... surely by now everyone here ought to know that if you say "legos" not "lego" when talking about more than 1 lego brick, yet another barely-on-topic flame war about the pluralisation of Lego is inevitable? It happens every single time there is a Lego related story.
Is it time to start modding people who still use "legos" when they know what the result will be as trolls?
Does Microsoft really get things right with enough retries? It's a common misconception that Windows 3 'got it right' and took over the world, but I think that was actually down to luck, when Windows 3.1 for Workgroups cashed in on the coincidental boom in office networking. Recent versions Office and Windows don't seem to be any more 'right' than before, they still sell because they are de-facto standards rather than actually 'good'.
Sorry, if the IBM system never touches PSTN as you describe, then this fails part 4 of the EFF's list of features the prior art needs to have:
From the EFF site: CRITICAL FEATURES OF PRIOR ART NEEDED:
1. The system must have the ability to connect an audio telephone call from a calling party to a receiving party.
2. The telephone call must be "full duplex," meaning that both parties must be able to talk and listen at the same time. For example, regular telephone calls usually are full duplex, whereas walkie-talkie conversations in which a person cannot receive transmissions from others while he or she is transmitting generally are not.
3. An ordinary telephone and telephone line are the only equipment the receiving party needs to have. The receiving party does not need to have a computer or an Internet connection to receive the call.
4. The transmission of the call is routed in part through a "public computer network" and in part through the PSTN. This implies that the transmission must cross at least one gateway between the "public computer network" and the PSTN. The Internet is one example of a "public computer network," but the patent does not define what else would qualify as a "public computer network."
Additional Features:
1. The caller must only have to dial the destination number and no additional phone numbers
Not over the internet, or using intetnet protocol, so it's not VOIP.
(note to mods: I know I've posted this 3 times in reply to different people, but I maintain it's not redundant until people actually grok the concept and stop posting/modding up non VOIP references.)
Prior art (which kills your 'text in a computer file' patent) is the easiest way of dealing with these patent trolls. While "it's blindingly obvious" is technically a valid reason to get patents struck down, it's tough to make such historical a value judgement stick in court, dealing with facts is what coursts are best at. Otherwise it either ends up in the old whoever has the most lawyers wins situation, or worse the transcript reads like this:
EFF: "Your Honour, this idea is obvious, you'd have to be a blithering idiot not to have thought of this" Judge: "Well I didn't think of it!" EFF: "That's because your are a blith.... erm..." Defence: "We move that the case be struck down" Judge: "Case dismissed with prejudice!"
ISDN does not use Internet Protocol, so it's not VOIP. Everyone seems to be missing the fact that this patent is of the type "[existing idea] but on the internet". Prior art to bust it needs to have routed the call over a public network such as internet, not just any digital and/or private line.
That's a great example. "Ozymandias", CD only bonus track on the single "Dominion" by the Sisters of Mercy, rights owned by RIAA member Warner brothers.
Not available on iTunes, the only way to get it is via a torrent, or by spending about $50 for the original 3" CD secondhand, $0 of that $50 goes to Warners, $0 to the artist.
Have a pat on the back for a job well done, Warner Brothers, I'm sure your shareholders are proud of you.
Well, without the need to throw huge textures around they could have dropped blu-ray, and the huge bought-in graphics chip wouldn't be needed either. Adding 3 (4-1=3 btw) extra in-house chips and dropping 2 very expensive parts sounds like it wouldn't affect the cost too much, especially given that Cell was supposed (at that point) to be a uibquitous chip that would end up in TVs and toasters.
I recall early rumours about the PS3 having 39 processors, 4 cell chips with 9 each, plus 1 supervising CPU.
If only Sony had stuck with that and given us a machine that could real-time raytrace, then I probably would be queueing up to spend $837 on it (UK price of £425 converted at today's exchange rate).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not suggesting Clippy, I'm just suggesting disambiguation. Google already does this for typos (You searched for "kats musical song list" did you mean "cats musical song list"?). If Google noticed that the cats pages fell into 3 major categories (musical/animal/character who says 'all your base') and offered me those options in the typo line, I'd find that useful in narrowing down which of the 86,500,000 pages it found is the right one.
In your example, I'm guessing you might find the option to filter down by gay/straight or censored/uncensored useful?
No it's an terrible report. It's practically a cut and paste press release, and it's full of inaccuracies, fud and lies from the AACS.
"Digg began taking down pages that its members had highlighted were carrying the key." This implies that Digg took down external sites that it's members were pointing to. They did nothing of the sort, they only took down the pointers.
"The website said it was responding to legal "cease and desist" notices" Implies that Digg thought those takedown notices were legal. The legality of the takedown notices is actually highly questionable.
"Michael Ayers, chair of the AACS business group, said it had received "good cooperation from most folk" in preventing the leak of the key." A blindingly obvious lie that the BBC should have questioned.
"But a line is crossed when we start seeing keys being distributed and tools for circumvention. You step outside of the realm of protected free speech then." Another lie that the BBC reprinted unquestioningly.
"He added that the copy protection on the HD-DVDs was "absolutely not broken"." Another lie.
Most importantly, the AACS are repeatedly calling the discovery of the key a "leak" - it's not a leak at all, it was discovered, not leaked.
The sad thing is that it's so easy to learn how to get good results using current search engines, but people are never taught how to do it.
RDF could do very useful things, like throwing up a disambiguation question at the top os the results page when you've not made it clear what you want, or filtering out the plague of typosquatter/content free price comparison/'be the first to write a review of this item' sites, but so could a bit more intelligence built into Google.
Think about what Steve Jobs had to offer Intel or AMD at the time they decided to drop the PowerPC. AMD and Intel are at war over market share, and Steve held over 2% of the market by volume (and given Macs are not cheap, a bigger share if you go by $ value), and was offering exclusivity. AMD and Intel knew that if they didn't get that 2%, the other would. That's an incredibly strong bargaining position for Apple.
We don't know what's in the deal that was stuck with Intel, but given Steve's reputation for hard bargaining and Intel's desire for market share at any cost, I'm willing to bet it makes any chance of moving to AMD pretty unlikely - just look at where Intel are sending the world's entire supply of 3Ghz 4-core x86 chips.
It's not the contract on DVDs that's being discussed, it's the contract between the owners of CSS and manufacturers who buy into CSS. Kaleidescape signed the contract that gives them the right to make legitimate machines that unscramble CSS, the CSS cartel claim that contract includes a 'thou shalt not make dvd servers' clause, the judge agreed with Kaleidescape that the contract does not say that, since Kaleidescape didn't get to see that particular rule until after they joined the cartel.
This wouldn't just require new equipment to view the new transmissions, it would also require throwing out all the freeview kit that the BBC and the digital alliance have spent years convincing the public to buy. This idea could only really be implemented in an unused frequency band - the space vacated by the analogue switch-off seems ideal for it to me, if only the UK government can be prevented from selling it for some other use.
As the article says, a far simpler solution to the badwidth issues of freeview would be to ditch the huge number of junk channels and use the bandwidth to provide a HD signal for the ones that people actually watch.
Can someone in the know explain haw patent expiry works in US law? Here in Britain, patents last for 17 years, but can somesimes be extended to 20, so this patent filed March 25, 1987 wouldn't be valid - unless it's the date the patent is granted not the filing date that counts?
"the most successful launch in the history of the video games industry in Europe"
Hang on, Sony missed Christmas, gave us hobbled backwards compatibility and priced the thing so you can't get a console and a game for less than $900 here. Stores are full of people queueing for the Wii and ignoring stacks of unsold PS3s. I'd hate to see this guy's idea of an unsucessful launch!
Thanks so much, apple-U shows the headers properly! I'd assumed 'message source' meant viewing html/mime formatting, but the headers are there too, with line-wraps. This is a great work-round for me and anyone else trapped by this problem.
The yahoo panel only works if you know which throwaway yahoo ID you used...
I'm disappointed. No new features I actually want, at least 1 of the bugs I'm really annoyed about not fixed, and at least 1 new bug added.
Firstly, doing a 'check for updates' in the old version (1.5 for OS X, I think) told me there wasn't a new one. Then when I manually downloaded, installed and got past the inevitable 'we broke all the extensions' message, it's ignoring my preference to show text not icons in the toolbars. So I go into preferences, and it's saying I'm showing text only. I workround by switching to text plus icons then back to text only. It's decided to ignore my custom toolbar settings from the old version, so I manually rebuild them the way I like them. The text doesn't line up, 'get mail' floats half a line too high, and 'tag' is out of line too. The gaps between the text isn't consistent horizontally, there's more space around 'junk' than other tools.
Then the real pain, viewing full headers is still totally broken. The header text doesn't wrap, it ignores text size changes, and it can't be cut and pasted either. This means that I can't see the crucial part of the header that says the original 'to' address, after it's been forwarded to the catch-all on my domain, as it's on a line that's longer than my monitor is wide. So I still can't unsubscribe from a couple of (now spam dominated) Yahoo groups that I signed up to with throwaway names, as I have can't read the header to find out the throwaway name I used!
The jury is still out on the other annoying bug, where the automated 'compact folders' and automated 'get mail' try to run at the same time as each other and throw up a message blaming me for not waiting for one to finish before the other.
We've only got a report about this not the actual Sony statement to go on, but it seems to me that there's a total lack of apology here, just a blatantly absurd claim about how few complaints there were. Come on Sony, at least have the guts to say you are sorry... if if it's only 'we're sorry we got caught'.
Sony's PR department really don't seem to understand that they have a monumental image problem. A bit of humility in their press releases could have won back some respect for free, but instead they sent out something that reeks of arrogance.
The Apple Pro Mouse was the good one: optical sensing plus a beautiful design. The bad one was the previous Apple 'hockey puck' mouse, it's circular design meant you have to look away from the screen to see which way it was facing, and the mechanical ball rollers were a pain to clean. The majoy *annoyance* was however, not then mouse itself, but PC users crowing on about the 'one button' design, ignoring the fact that Mac Software was (surprisingly enough) designed for 1 button mice, and 103 more buttons were available on a nearby keyboard when required.
At the risk of being modded down... surely by now everyone here ought to know that if you say "legos" not "lego" when talking about more than 1 lego brick, yet another barely-on-topic flame war about the pluralisation of Lego is inevitable? It happens every single time there is a Lego related story.
Is it time to start modding people who still use "legos" when they know what the result will be as trolls?
Does Microsoft really get things right with enough retries? It's a common misconception that Windows 3 'got it right' and took over the world, but I think that was actually down to luck, when Windows 3.1 for Workgroups cashed in on the coincidental boom in office networking. Recent versions Office and Windows don't seem to be any more 'right' than before, they still sell because they are de-facto standards rather than actually 'good'.
Sorry, if the IBM system never touches PSTN as you describe, then this fails part 4 of the EFF's list of features the prior art needs to have:
From the EFF site: CRITICAL FEATURES OF PRIOR ART NEEDED:
1. The system must have the ability to connect an audio telephone call from a calling party to a receiving party.
2. The telephone call must be "full duplex," meaning that both parties must be able to talk and listen at the same time. For example, regular telephone calls usually are full duplex, whereas walkie-talkie conversations in which a person cannot receive transmissions from others while he or she is transmitting generally are not.
3. An ordinary telephone and telephone line are the only equipment the receiving party needs to have. The receiving party does not need to have a computer or an Internet connection to receive the call.
4. The transmission of the call is routed in part through a "public computer network" and in part through the PSTN. This implies that the transmission must cross at least one gateway between the "public computer network" and the PSTN. The Internet is one example of a "public computer network," but the patent does not define what else would qualify as a "public computer network."
Additional Features:
1. The caller must only have to dial the destination number and no additional phone numbers
Not over the internet, or using intetnet protocol, so it's not VOIP.
(note to mods: I know I've posted this 3 times in reply to different people, but I maintain it's not redundant until people actually grok the concept and stop posting/modding up non VOIP references.)
Not full duplex, not 'over the internet' so it's not VOIP.
Prior art (which kills your 'text in a computer file' patent) is the easiest way of dealing with these patent trolls. While "it's blindingly obvious" is technically a valid reason to get patents struck down, it's tough to make such historical a value judgement stick in court, dealing with facts is what coursts are best at. Otherwise it either ends up in the old whoever has the most lawyers wins situation, or worse the transcript reads like this:
EFF: "Your Honour, this idea is obvious, you'd have to be a blithering idiot not to have thought of this"
Judge: "Well I didn't think of it!"
EFF: "That's because your are a blith.... erm..."
Defence: "We move that the case be struck down"
Judge: "Case dismissed with prejudice!"
ISDN does not use Internet Protocol, so it's not VOIP. Everyone seems to be missing the fact that this patent is of the type "[existing idea] but on the internet". Prior art to bust it needs to have routed the call over a public network such as internet, not just any digital and/or private line.
Unless IBM were using internet protocol (the IP in VOIP) a decade before the internet started, then that's probably not prior art.
Yes, the linked article says the EFF are specifically looking for proof that VocalTec or Net2Phone were doing this before 20th September 1995.
I guess the E.T. cartridge solution was ruled out on environmental grounds?
That's a great example. "Ozymandias", CD only bonus track on the single "Dominion" by the Sisters of Mercy, rights owned by RIAA member Warner brothers.
Not available on iTunes, the only way to get it is via a torrent, or by spending about $50 for the original 3" CD secondhand, $0 of that $50 goes to Warners, $0 to the artist.
Have a pat on the back for a job well done, Warner Brothers, I'm sure your shareholders are proud of you.
Well, without the need to throw huge textures around they could have dropped blu-ray, and the huge bought-in graphics chip wouldn't be needed either. Adding 3 (4-1=3 btw) extra in-house chips and dropping 2 very expensive parts sounds like it wouldn't affect the cost too much, especially given that Cell was supposed (at that point) to be a uibquitous chip that would end up in TVs and toasters.
I recall early rumours about the PS3 having 39 processors, 4 cell chips with 9 each, plus 1 supervising CPU.
If only Sony had stuck with that and given us a machine that could real-time raytrace, then I probably would be queueing up to spend $837 on it (UK price of £425 converted at today's exchange rate).